Citrus fruit and the ways thereof

Or, how I ended up with 31 jars of this...

One of each, February 2014

Late January and early February see oranges amers (Seville oranges, literally bitter oranges) in the shops in this part of France. I harangued the couple who run the fruit and vegetable stall at Le Grand Pressigny market for five weeks, to be told they wouuld have some "la semaine prochaine". The next week, the answer was the same. Meanwhile I had bought two kilos of Seville oranges from Intermarché and made "Jill Archer's Ambridge Marmalade" (see recipe). Then the market stall turned up with the goods and I felt obliged to buy some more. This time I made Delia Smith's Dundee marmalade, a dark, chunky marmalade with a lovely deep red colour. The recipe is here. It set rather better than my last Oxford marmalade but still was not as firm as I like. I now had 23 jars of marmalade, not including stock from previous years still on the cellier shelf.

I had done what I always do when making marmalade - bought too many lemons. I therefore decided to make lemon curd, with the addition of two more lemons. The recipe is from the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book, 1966 edition (one of the things I'd try to save from a fire, along with the cats and my husband). For me, lemon curd involves a gadget! My mother's Swan Brand double saucepan comes into its own for lemon curd. You can find one on E-bay for less than a tenner.

Never mind photographing that saucepan! Where's my supper, you worthless dog?

This is basically one saucepan that fits closely inside another. You place a little water in the bottom pan, and the food goes in the top pan, to be cooked by steam from beneath. This permits gentle cooking of sauces, eggs and anything else that requires consistent low heat or that burns easily. Egg dishes in particular are very heat sensitive and the protein in the egg denatures (and goes hard) if it gets too hot. The double saucepan  makes perfect creamy, smooth scrambled eggs - as my landlady, Vera Sargisson, taught me when I first started work, in York in 1973. Mrs Sargisson was the widow of a housemaster at Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire and no doubt she used to scramble eggs for the boys of his house when they were feeling low.

Double saucepans are known in the US as double boilers. The classic French bain marie was once the same thing but has spawned numerous offspring with the addition of electricity, steam valves, etc. You can substitute a basin standing over a saucepan of simmering water, but it's tricky to lift in and out without a handle, and painfully slow unless you have a metal (stainless steel) basin.

Lemon Curd is a British delicacy, in French properly called "pâte à tartiner au citron" - lemon spread for bread - but also called "lemon curd"!.

Lemon curd on Carré moulé bread from the Abilly bakery

According to my Good Housekeeping Cookery Book, 1966 edition, lemon curd is made as follows:

Four eggs, beaten (I added an extra yolk, because they were small eggs)
grated rind and juice of 4 lemons
100g (4 ounces) of butter
450g (1 lb) of sugar

Put all the ingredients into the top of a double saucepan. Heat gently and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Continue heating, stirring from time to time, until the curd thickens. Pot and cover in the usual way. Keep in a cool place, refrigerate once opened. Keep no longer than two months.
Makes about 700g (1.5 lb, or three more jars).

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The secret of the process is not to stir continuously, whatever your recipe book says, because it will never thicken if you do! Some recipes say strain the eggs, some say strain the cooked curd, some don't say to strain either. The objective of all this straining is to get rid of the slime strings which turn into wiggly white lumps in the curd. The easiest way to eliminate these is to pick them out of the cooked curd with a teaspoon as you see them while filling the pots. It's a good idea to strain the lemon juice, to remove those tiny seeds and bits of fruit.You can make curd with any citrus fruit in the same way - substitute 6 or 8 limes, clementines or tangerines, or a couple of oranges, or a grapefruit for the lemons.

The jar count is now 26. And then Tim bought 2kg of Clementines, variety "Nour". These were plump and gleaming, but turned out to be incredibly sour, and suitable only for cooking or juicing. Eight of these became five jars, albeit small ones, of Clementine Curd, courtesy of Jamie Oliver (recipe here).

Clementine curd, to a Jamie Oliver recipe

The grand total is 31 jars. I have been giving jars to every visitor, to the fruit stall people (non-plussed) and to the Joumiers at the Saffron Fair (regular customer, swap for goat cheese). I'm saving some for special friends of course!

Incidentally, my Fuji Finepix JZ300 camera recognised a human face in one of these photographs, and put a green square around it to show how clever it had been. Anyone who spots this face before I give the game away gets a jar of marmalade, or curd, according to preference.

The makings of a reet good tea

Marmalade Gingerbread

Ready to cut

A couple of years ago I made Seville orange marmalade with crushed coriander seeds, but neither of us really likes the bits of seed in it, so I decided to try using it in a cake. Hilaire Walden in her book "Sensational Preserves" claims that, having once made Marmalade Gingerbread, she no longer uses black treacle or golden syrup, just marmalade. I substituted a few items, and it still worked very well. Instead of preserved ginger, I had some rather elderly crystallized ginger from Julian Graves, bought before we moved over here. It had gone a bit dry, so I soaked 14 pieces of it overnight and then chopped it. I also substituted a mixture of currants and sultanas for raisins, as all the raisins had been snacked!

Ingredients:
225g/8oz butter, cut in bits
225g/8oz dark brown sugar
300ml/10floz milk
225g/8oz marmalade
350g/12oz self raising flour (if you only have plain flour, add 2 teaspoons baking powder / 1 sachet levure chimique)
1½-2 tablespoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
2 eggs, beaten
7 pieces preserved ginger, chopped
115g/4oz raisins

Method:
Pre-heat the oven to 160°C/310°F/gas mark 2. Butter a 20-22.5cm/8-9inch round cake tin and line the base with greaseproof paper or baking parchment.
In a saucepan (not a small saucepan....), gently heat together the butter, sugar, milk and marmalade stirring occasionally, until the sugar and marmalade have all dissolved. Remove the pan from the heat and allow the mixture to cool. Sift together the flour, bicarb, baking powder (if using), and ground spices. Make a well in the middle and pour in the liquid a bit at a time, stirring to make a smooth batter, and adding the eggs towards the end. Stir in the ginger and raisins. Pour the mixture into the cake tin and bake for about 1½ hours until the cake is firm to the touch and a kebab skewer inserted into the middle comes out dry. Leave to cool in the tin. Store in an airtight container. Leave for a day before eating, if you can bear it!

The first slice...

My 9-inch springform tin looked ideal, but the cooked cake turned out not to fit my storage tin! Somewhere in a box is my Tupperware cake box... Hilaire Walden suggests Tangerine Marmalade and Peach Marmalade work as well as orange. I wonder whether cherry jam would work?

A succulent texture

Seville Orange season

Real English marmalade requires just three ingredients - bigarade oranges, sugar and water. That's correct, no vanilla pod! Bigarade oranges are usually called Seville oranges in the UK and oranges amères or bigarades in France, and they are available right now if you know where to look. The season is less than a month long but apparently they freeze well (I like seasonal stuff, in season!). They are normally untreated, never wax-coated and often come with leaves, bird droppings and so on. I'm told that supermarkets in both countries have them, but I've never found them in France and only at Morrisons in the St John Centre, Leeds (not the Kirkstall branch). My usual source, the organic greengrocers in Otley, closed not long before we left the UK. Fortunately our friend Susan told us that the fruit stall in Preuilly sur Claise market "opposite the fish stall" had them, but only in mid January. And indeed they did.

Tim likes coarse cut dark Oxford marmalade and I like fine cut Golden Shred, so I bought enough to make both.

Originally, marmalade was not made with oranges at all, but with quinces (marmelo in portuguese). The name has the same origin as the spanish membrillo, which means "quince". Dulce de membrillo is a thick delicious quince jam called marmelada in portuguese.  Seville oranges (citrus aurantium) are not the same species as sweet oranges (citrus sinensis). They are rather bulgy and ugly, with somewhat longer stalks than sweet oranges, and a texture to the skin of the sort you wouldn't like to see on your thighs. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in a Guardian article of 29 January 2011 relates the story of how marmalade came to be.

Bigarade - full of Spanish sunshine

My recipe for Oxford Marmalade came from Hilaire Walden's Sensational Preserves, as you can see a well-used volume. One really nice thing about Sensational Preserves is, it has a number of recipes for yummy things to make with your preserves, such as Marmalade Gingerbread.

Ready to go!

Oxford Marmalade - for about 5 1-lb jars
Imperial measure:
1.5 pounds of Seville oranges
3 pints boiling water
3 pounds of sugar
Metric recipe (don't mix them!):
1 kilo of Seville oranges
2.5 litres of boiling water
2 kilos of sugar
Scrub the oranges and remove the stalks. Peel the oranges and cut them into chunky strips, pith and all (don't use a food processor). Put the peel into a large heatproof bowl. Chop up the flesh, extract the pips and put them into a small bowl. The flesh and juice goes in the big bowl. Pour half a pint of the boiling water onto the pips and the rest onto the peel and flesh. Cover both bowls and leave overnight.

In the morning you will find the pips coated in a transparent jelly. This is mainly pectin which is the agent that makes your marmalade set. You need this! So get as much of it off the pips as you can and into the bowl with the peel and flesh. Wash it through a non-metallic sieve, placed over the large bowl, dunking it up and down in the liquid as much as you can without spilling the pips. The best way to do this is with your fingers. Discard the pips.

Transfer the contents of the large bowl to a big saucepan with a lid, bring it to a boil then simmer it partially covered for 2-3 hours, stirring occasionally until the peel is really soft. The longer you cook it, the darker it will be after the sugar is added. You don't want the liquid to reduce by more than about half - top up if necessary.


Warm the sugar using the keep-warm setting of your oven if you have one (80 C). Add the sugar to the cooked fruit a bit at a time, stirring until it dissolves. Meanwhile, put the jamjars in the oven to sterilise and warm to jam temperature. Bring the jam to a rolling boil and cook for 10-15 minutes or until setting point is reached. I used a jam thermometer, but the quantity is rather small for one of these to be accurate, so I backed up by plopping a blob of liquid on a chilled plate. The blob wrinkled nicely when poked with a fingertip, so the marmalade was ready. If you pot it straight away all the peel floats to the top, so the trick is to let it stand for a quarter of an hour or so, then stir it gently. This will also disperse any froth that appears on the surface of the marmalade. Fill pots and cover. Leave overnight to set.

The finished article ready for labelling